Thursday, January 7, 2010

We saw the federal government, under the Bush II regime, repeatedly say "what symptoms, what economic problems" as the patient complained time and time again.

Then when the patient was driven into a paralytic state, we saw the Bush II regime administer its treatments once it saw the patient clearly suffering serious sickness.

Of course they misdiagnosed the economic disease they had spread, calling for some of that good old fashioned snake oil.

Their diagnosis was to give those who destroyed the economic lives of millions of Americans more of the public money for their casino gambling type of economics, rather that correct their behaviour.

The new doctor, the Obama administration, drunk on the hope/myth of "bi-partisanship" ("lets screw things up together") following on the heals of the champagne election, decided that more of the same medicine was the cure.

So they happily did more of the same, putting the public money into the stock market and other financial instruments through big belligerent banks.

Long before Gov. David Paterson delivered his annual report on New York’s condition on Wednesday, everyone knew that the state of the state was desperate. New York is crippled by a mounting budget crisis and saddled with a Legislature that is incompetent in its governance and corrupt in its behavior.

To his great credit, Mr. Paterson skipped the usual, and usually insincere, homages to his fellow politicians and went straight into an unsparing assessment of fiscal and political reality. He insisted that the Legislature attack economics and ethics at the same time.

“Cultures of addiction to spending, power and approval have ruined empires, and now they threaten the Empire State,” he said ...

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

There is a post by two former 9/11 Commission officials which sets out some similarities in 12/15 and 9/11:

IN the days since the attempted Christmas Day airplane bombing, many officials, including the White House’s counterterrorism director, John Brennan, have insisted that the Detroit incident was “not like 9/11.” In many respects, we agree. But the government’s handling of the intelligence leading up to the attack was eerily reminiscent of one of the most shocking — and relatively underreported — revelations to come out of the 9/11 commission’s hearings.

The commission, having been informed that before 9/11 the State Department maintained a list of known or suspected terrorists whose travel should be restricted, asked Federal Aviation Administration officials how many of that list’s 61,000 names were on the F.A.A.’s “no fly” registry. The answer supplied by senior aviation administration officials was astonishing in two respects. First, the commission was told, the no-fly list had not 61,000 names but only 12, and included none of the 9/11 hijackers, even though the F.B.I. was searching actively for two of them before the attack.

Then came the bombshell: the F.A.A. security officials were unaware — until the commission asked its question at a hearing — that the State Department maintained a terrorist watch list at all.

(NY Times). The Obama Administration reacted quickly to 12/25 in that the President went on national news and informed the public of errors on 12/25 after a quick review.

He [the king] has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

(Independence From What). The early presidents explained why civilian over military was an integral part of freedom:

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied : and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. Those truths are well established.

(Greatest Source, emphasis added). Some academics, diplomats, and leaders of various sorts say that the U.S. has returned to that once-rejected reality:

The Worldwide control of humanity's economic, social and political activities is under the helm of US corporate and military power. Underlying this process are various schemes of direct and indirect military intervention. These US sponsored strategies ultimately consist in a process of global subordination ... US strategists, in an attempt to justify their military interventions in different parts of the World, have conceptualised the greatest fraud in US history, namely "the Global War on Terrorism" (GWOT). The latter, using a fabricated pretext constitutes a global war against all those who oppose US hegemony ... The US has established its control over 191 governments which are members of the United Nations. The conquest, occupation and/or otherwise supervision of these various regions of the World is supported by an integrated network of military bases and installations which covers the entire Planet (Continents, Oceans and Outer Space). All this pertains to the workings of an extensive Empire, the exact dimensions of which are not always easy to ascertain ... The main sources of information on these military installations (e.g. C. Johnson, the NATO Watch Committee, the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases) reveal that the US operates and/or controls between 700 and 800 military bases Worldwide ... In this regard, Hugh d’Andrade and Bob Wing's 2002 Map 1 entitled "U.S. Military Troops and Bases around the World, The Cost of 'Permanent War'", confirms the presence of US military personnel in 156 countries ... The US Military has bases in 63 countries. Brand new military bases have been built since September 11, 2001 in seven countries ... In total, there are 255,065 US military personnel deployed Worldwide ... These facilities include a total of 845,441 different buildings and equipments. The underlying land surface is of the order of 30 million acres. According to Gelman, who examined 2005 official Pentagon data, the US is thought to own a total of 737 bases in foreign lands. Adding to the bases inside U.S. territory, the total land area occupied by US military bases domestically within the US and internationally is of the order of 2,202,735 hectares, which makes the Pentagon one of the largest landowners worldwide (Gelman, J., 2007).

(Canadian Professor, emphasis added). U.S. observers during the era of WW II noticed that the military was in firm control even then:

"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims, while incidentally capturing their markets; to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples, while blundering accidentally into their oil wells."

The big picture here is that the right wing warsters are firmly in power, peace is a farce, along with peace movements, a kinder and gentler nation movements, as well as the green revolution.

These movements are engendered by a notion of natural human rights which tend to originate on the left.

They are not a farce in the eyes of the world in terms of what is best for the world of humanity, but rather they are a farce in terms of whether or not the civilian authorities are in control over military authorities.

A large segment of the left and the right in the United States are deluded into not seeing what is not all that hard to see.

Concerning the "Canadian Professor" mentioned and linked to above:

"Jules Dufour is President of the United Nations Association of Canada (UNA-C) – Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean branch and Research Associate at the Center for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Quebec, Chicoutimi.

In 2007, Professor Jules Dufour became Chevalier de l'Ordre national du Québec, a distinction conferred by the Quebec government, for his contributions to World peace and human rights, his numerous scholarly writings and the work he accomplished in the context of national and international commissions on issues pertaining to regional development, human rights and the protection of the environment."

Monday, January 4, 2010

The wealth of the middle class has evaporated at alarming levels while the upper 1%, the Ferengi, have filled their coffers beyond what they could ever use. Concerning the status up to 2004, educators tell us:

These data suggest that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small number of families. The wealthiest 1 percent of families owns roughly 34.3% of the nation's net worth, the top 10% of families owns over 71%, and the bottom 40% of the population owns way less than 1%.

The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that households lost ... 9 percent, of their wealth in the last three months of 2008, the most ever in a single quarter in the 57-year history of recordkeeping by the central bank.For the full year, household wealth dropped ... about 18 percent.

The figures are not all in, but after some adjustments, one observer had this to say:

“We knew we fell into a real deep hole,” said Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities Inc. in Charlotte, North Carolina. “It’s encouraging to see we’re at least making progress in digging ourselves out of it. American households are having to lower their sights as to how much wealth they hope to accumulate over their lifetimes. This is going to impact consumption habits for years to come.”

(Bloomberg, emphasis added). I have noticed a pattern: they minimize the bad news, promise better things, then revise in the form of more inflated "good news", after they think we have "learned to live with" the disaster of plunder.

The states of California and New York, as well as some others, are in grave danger fiscally, the federal deficit is out of control, there is a classified budget we are not allowed to see, we spend more on war and the military than all the other nations of the world combined, and things are getting better?

Nevertheless, there is not enough of the people's money in their own Treasury to help them now, because the war in Afghanistan, war in Iraq, brewing war in the Americas, grumblings in the middle east, and the bankers who "need" trillions of dollars, take top priority.

It gives new meaning to "yes we can", once repeated like a New Orleans mantra by those who voted for Obama.

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